Contactless Heart Rate Measurement System

Report : Contactless Heart Rate Measurement System

HR is an important indicator of a person’s body condition and significantly represents his or her vital signs that are used to measure basic bodily functions. HR is measured by the number of heart beats per unit of time and is expressed as beats per minute (bpm). Most commonly, two methods are widely used for measuring HR: Electrocardiograph (ECG) and pulse oximetry that provides a Photoplethysmography (PPG). Both methods require human contact to some extent or can cause cross-contamination of the devices used. To overcome these drawbacks, in our project, a non-contact computer vision-based heart rate measurement approach is described.

• This technique uses facial videos as shown in the figure above to extract the minute variations in the color changes of the face due to the different absorptivity or reflectivity when the blood flows to and from the heart during each cardiovascular cycle.

• We compared our estimated heart rate with ground truth given by a pulse oximeter and obtained different degrees of performance in terms of percentage mean error for different skin tones i.e., 0.26 bpm for fair skin, 0.69 bpm for brown skin and 1 bpm for dark skin.